He sheepishly approached the gym owner. He would have to quit, he said, because he needed to find more steady work and a place to live above spending the money to train on a possibly promising MMA opportunity.

He got a response he didn’t expect.

“He basically told me, ‘I see potential in you, and I think you can make it,'” Harris said. “‘If you clean the gym and scrub the floors, you can train here for me, and we’ll figure out how you can live.’

“It was an unbelievable thing.”

And Harris has made the most of it. With a 6-1 MMA record that includes the quickest knockout in Legacy Fighting Championship history – a defeat of Kenneth Fuller in July 2010 officially listed at five seconds – Harris is now preparing for his next opportunity with a new three-fight Legacy contract.

He will make his debut in that new deal on Feb. 24 when he takes on Chidi Njokuani, the brother of UFC fighter Anthony Njokuani, at the HDNet-televised Legacy Fighting Championship 10 event in Houston, Texas. The 27-year-old native Texan, born and raised in Pearland, will get a chance to continue a two-fight winning streak that followed his only defeat, against Mike Bronzoulis in November 2010.

Harris, though, has been fighting for much longer than that.

“The funny thing is I had a really good childhood,” he said. “Things didn’t get messy until I was about 11.”

Downward spiral

Harris’ father was an engineer, which provided a level of comfort for the middle-class family in the Houston suburbs. But things weren’t always as good as they seemed.

His father provided well for the family, but he didn’t provide much emotionally, Harris said. He and Harris’ mother had marital problems, though Harris didn’t know much about it. He was instead corralling the neighborhood kids into the backyard to act out the newest Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.

Fighting was part of Harris’ dreams from an early age. He hoped one day, when he turned 18, he would be able to get paid to do it for real instead of acting out movies.

When he was 11, Harris watched his parents split up, and he moved with his mother to Florida. Because she worked often, he took care of himself in large chunks of time.

“It was, ‘There’s peanut butter and jelly and bread, and if you want anything else, you have to get it yourself,'” Harris said with a laugh.

They shared a one-bedroom apartment, which resulted in tight quarters. Still, Harris was mostly on the straight and narrow until he returned to Texas at age 14.

During his freshman year of high school back in Texas, Harris said, he was sent to a juvenile detention facility for a possession of marijuana conviction. His sentence was three months, but he spent about a year incarcerated, foreshadowing the aggressiveness he later showed in his fights.

“Three months was gonna be pretty short,” Harris said, “but apparently if you act like an idiot and get in fights every day like I did, they extend that.”

After a year in the facility, Harris’ life continued to decline. He said he slept with a vodka bottle next to his bed because of addiction to alcohol by the time he was 16. At 17, he had the realization that he hoped would shake him from his current lifestyle.

“I looked in the mirror, and there was this 105-pound kid,’ ” Harris said. “I didn’t like who I was becoming.”

Bodybuilder to fighter

Harris’ first athletic action after disliking the view of his 105-pound self was lifting weights. He said he reached as high as 240 pounds in five years of lifting heavily. He has also never lost his desire to become a fighter.

Around the time he was his most muscle-bound, Harris looked into hooking on with an MMA school. It was 2006, and the only problem, interestingly enough for him, was his new significant size.

“I said, ‘I wanna fight,’ and they said, ‘First thing you have to do is lose a ton of weight,'” Harris said.

So he worked in the opposite direction, dropping pounds while training for what he hoped would eventually be a fighting career. By 2008, he took his first amateur fight, a loss. Then he lost another amateur fight, and by the time he finished his third amateur fight and earned his first win, his poor job prospects and money troubles were significant.

He figured he was destined for the grueling days of the oil fields, which wouldn’t leave the time or energy to train. Instead, he got the cleaning-for-training deal that he says saved his new livelihood.

In October 2009, he made his professional debut, and he won his first three pro fights, helping him get a place of his own and continue his training. That stretch included his extremely brief victory against Fuller, which became a popular YouTube clip.

Since his only loss, he has won two Legacy Fighting Championship bouts to move out of despair and into the career he dreamed about in his childhood backyard.

“Just to get that first pro fight, that feeling at the time, I don’t know what could top that,” he said. “That saved me. It moved me from a motel and bouncing around with friends to having a place to live. Everything was riding on that.”

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